After twenty-five days on the run, the New Orleans’ Naked Pizza team caught Evan Ratliff, the Wired magazine writer who voluntarily disappeared as part of its Vanish contest! This is how we tracked Evan to New Orleans in time to alert the great Naked Pizza folks who responded aggressively and won the day for Vanish trackers.

On August 15th, Ratliff disappeared. According to the contest rules, the first person who photographed Ratliff and said the word “Fluke” to him received a password to claim the $5,000 prize. The winner was Jeff Leach of Naked Pizza in New Orleans.

Since vanishing, Evan had been publishing regular travel updates to a secret protected Twitter account unknown until now which I infiltrated by gaining the support of his Twitter followers across the globe. Initially, Evan published his tweets in the open before protecting his account sometime after leaving the Santa Monica, California area.

It’s important to clarify that, for the most part, any “mistakes” Evan makes are clues he purposely left behind to make the contest fair and to showcase points he made in his recent Wired story: (Gone Forever: What does it take to really disappear?) The story details how the disappeared often give themselves away by seeking information on their pursuers’ progress or returning to common habits. Evan purposely repeated these mistakes and each led to us catching him.

What does this have to do with NewsCloud?

After the Iranian election uprising, I worked to ensure that we could launch NewsCloud’s Facebook community application technology to respond more quickly to important current events. Wired’s Vanish contest presented an excellent soft test case, so I launched “VanishTeam” to cover Evan’s disappearance and support the tracker community in one day. Evan’s subsequent visits to the VanishTeam application ultimately led to me the discovery of his secret twitter travel journal.

Cracking TOR Requires More than IP Addresses

While many people, including Evan, thought that Wired’s publishing the IP addresses from his gmail account login history would be essential to locating him, this has turned out not to be the case. His use of TOR made locating him quite difficult. Other clues were difficult or obscured by misinformation posted by people trying to help Evan avoid detection. As a result, many contest participants started to lose interest in the hunt. Cracking TOR anonymity is beyond the reach of most #vanish trackers. However, without going into much detail here, VanishTeam found a way to begin tracking Evan’s IP addresses after we identified the “fraudulent” Facebook account he had created.

Googling for jdgatz showed google cache entries of adventures in Venice and Santa Monica (cache is now expired) which matched previous clues released by Wired and the beach video. Evan left his posts open for the first week of his disappearance. I knew I had Evan in my sights but then had to find out to get access to Evan’s future Tweets.

Evan initially chose over 20 followers, later reduced down to fifteen, mostly popular multi-level marketers and auto-responding twitter followers. This may have helped him conceal the “newness” of his Twitter account. Although Evan entrusted his travels to more than a few Twitter porn-bots, once he protected his account – any new follow request would likely tip him off. Gaining access to his current tweets wouldn’t be as simple as creating a fake porn account and asking his permission to follow.

Infiltrating Evan’s New Secret Twitter Identity

However, some of these people were real folks and I was able to earn their trust. First, I made a late night Skype call to a Twitter follower in New Zealand (@AraneaNZ). He was intrigued by the contest and sent me Evan’s entire Tweet history. But to catch Evan, I would need real time updates from someone closer to my timezone – so I found other followers and all three continued sharing Evan’s updates with me.

From his Twitter feed, I managed to piece together Evan’s travels (see below). In it, he not only talks about his exploits, but also his appearance at the U.S. soccer match at Rio Tinto in Utah. The jdgatz account also offered links to a Tumblr website http://bespect.com (which Evan later removed). Bespect.com is registered by a “James Gatz”. Bespect also linked to a larger version of Evan’s profile picture. Finally, the Bespect site offers a pre-paid cell # Evan has likely been using: 1-970-614-5437. I also found a MobyPicture account with one image of a hotel room. Even by clicking on Bespect.com once, I might have given myself away to Evan via his Tumblr logs.

Most importantly, we learned from Evan’s tweets that he had shaved his head before attending the crowded soccer match where so many trackers might be.

We received several IP trails from Evan’s fake Facebook account at VanishTeam.com in the day after his arrival in Atlanta. Two were from a wireless Virgin Mobile account which did not reveal any geographic information. Late on Monday the 7th, Evan visited again revealing an IP in New Orleans. I had the help of @socillion in verifying the exact location of each IP address.

Coincidentally, around the same time, I noticed that Evan had re-opened his jdgatz tweet feed to the public. I quickly used two fake twitter accounts to follow him and set them up so that they appeared similar to other followers (yes, even a fembot) he had already chosen. Now, I had direct access to his updates. We also had a handful of trusted Vanish Team community members online but didn’t have anyone on the ground there to catch him. An hour or so later, I almost missed that Evan had begun following three new twitter accounts – each a New Orleans business (@neworleansrum – a rum distillery with factory tours, @nakedpizza – a twitter-savvy pizza operation with Evan’s favorite gluten-free crust and @lakefrontnola – a wedding videographer). I took a risk and blasted late night emails about the contest and Evan’s presence to each of the three businesses. I almost felt badly about possibly ruining imagined plans of Evan hiring the videographer to film his wedding in New Orleans.

The next morning, I received a call from Jeff Leach of Naked Pizza. Jeff was super excited and motivated and got his team in gear – not only at Naked Pizza, but even sent people to the Rum distillery and to two book readings we suspected Evan might go to. Without Jeff’s aggressiveness and excitement, Evan would still be missing. The $3,000 Evan has to contribute of the prize money out of his own pocket for being caught probably makes the “comped” gluten-free pizza he received from Naked Pizza the most expensive in history.

Evan’s Biggest Clues/”Mistakes”

The biggest clue Evan left was by visiting the Vanish Team Facebook application with a profile photo that so closely resembled the video of himself on Venice Beach. I don’t think I would have noticed him if he had used a fake photo. Even if he had used the Facebook generic avatar, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish him from the other fake Facebook accounts with generic avatars.

Secondly, he kept returning to Vanish Team more than once a day using this same account. Thirdly, he rarely visited Vanish Team using TOR – so he left his IP address in our log. The Vanish Team application became part of the game – essentially a trap for Evan – one he stumbled into each day knowingly and willingly. This is something that we would never do with our Facebook technology if Evan hadn’t asked us to pursue him – but it’s a useful reminder of “relative” anonymity on the Web.

Thirdly, by following random Twitter accounts with his protected jdgatz account, Evan left open avenues for trackers to infiltrate his own posts by contacting those people who were strangers to him.

It will be interesting to learn more about Evan’s clues and puzzles. Vanish Team was the only team that knew Evan was in New Orleans and the only team that had discovered his jdgatz feed. We were the only team that knew he had shaved his head (as imagined at right via Photoshop). I’m not certain how easily other trackers could have found Evan without running their own “media” site.

One suggested path would be searching Twitter for keywords of his known locations. After the Venice Beach video, searching twitter may have quickly turned up the jdgatz account. He had even published to the #venicebeach and #santamonica twitter tags and linked to the hotel he was staying in on two occasions.

Conclusion

Throughout this week, I’ve been amazed at how quickly people’s interest spikes and their eagerness to help increases when they hear about this contest. Perhaps there’s a real hunger for play in our lives or perhaps we just get annoyed when someone tells us they can outwit us. I’ve had to admit to myself that perhaps I am drawn to Evan’s contest because I’ve been working too hard this past year to get a long vacation of my own. Deep down, I think I want to hit the road just as Evan has – but not as mysteriously.

In retrospect, Evan said all along that he intended to duplicate the curiosity for his pursuers that had been the downfall of people who purposely vanished before him. Joining Vanish Team on Facebook with a photo of his latest disguise, tweeting publicly and then privately about his activities – were all foolish, arrogant things Evan promised to do – but left a very detailed trail of his journey.

Closing in on his trail required Internet forensics as well as soft social skills getting random Twitter personalities to trust me and share Evan’s tweets. It also required taking risks by trusting and cooperating with anonymous people from the Internet. So far, these techniques have proven as effective as any boots on the ground as private investigators told Wired trackers to engage. In my opinion, the limited prize money, difficulty or scarceness of verifiable clues and the abundance of misinformation made getting out into the field seem very premature. However, the contest in the end required boots on the ground. I’m just glad those boots were Jeff Leach’s and the Naked Pizza team.

Thanks to Evan and Wired Editor Nick Thompson for running such a well-conceived, fun, contest. Evan, trust me, your role in this was way more glamorous than the time I’ve spent by the computer these past two weeks following you. Thanks to all the #vanish folks for participating in such a positive spirit. Thanks to Teeuwynn from Lone Shark Games for helping hunters with puzzles and keeping our findings in confidence. Thanks also to the Vanish Team members and contributors who kept our big secret from Evan – just long enough!